A husbands affair with a teenage mistress provokes his wife to arrange secret liaisons for a randy neighbour...

Keith Waterhouse is very particular about what lunch is not: 'It is not prawn cocktail, steak and Black Forest gateau with your bank manger. It is not civic, commemorative, annual office or funeral. It is not when either party is on a diet, on the wagon or in a hurry.' He is equally precise about what lunch is: 'It is a mid-day meal taken at leisure by, ideally, two people. Three's a crowd, four always split like a double amoeba into two pairs, six is a meeting, eight is a conference... A little light business may be touched upon but the occasion is firmly social. Whether they know it or not,...

This book has a complex history. It was originally written in 1979 as a series of style notes for journalists on the Daily Mirror, and it has gone in and out of print ever since - whilst simultaneously establishing a reputation as a classic of clear guidance and an analysis of tabloid journalism. Keith Waterhouse is one of the old Fleet Street school who actually care about clarity, accuracy, and good prose style. Writing from the point of view of a working journalist, he inspects the linguistic practice of the press and reveals its weaknesses in a series of witty mini-essays. He adopts the...

'Buy, borrow or beg Keith Waterhouse's outstanding new novel. I can't recommend it too highly. Waterhouse has an uncanny gift for recapturing every attitude, agony and phrase of childhood and youth.' - "Daily Mirror"
'I wished I'd written Keith Waterhouse's first novel; and now, even more, I wish I'd written his second . . . "Billy Liar" is very funny: funny in a wild and sardonic and high-spirited way without malice or cruelty.' - John Braine, author of "Room at the Top"
'A brilliant novel, in language fresh and sweet, with characters vivid and singular in an inventive and dynamic...

'The funniest book I've read for years' - "The Times" (London)
'Among the few great writers of our time' - Auberon Waugh, "The Independent"
'Well written and amusing' - "Library Journal"
Keith Waterhouse's comic masterpiece "Billy Liar" (1959) introduced us to Billy Fisher, a seventeen-year-old undertaker's clerk whose inability to tell the truth led him into constant (and often hilarious) trouble with his parents, his employer, and his three girlfriends. It was a smash success, becoming a bestseller and winning widespread acclaim for both the novel and the classic film...

C. L. Jubb is thirty-six, married, gainfully employed, and active in his community, both in local government and as a volunteer youth leader working with disadvantaged boys. But as he narrates the story of his downfall, we begin to see that he is other things as well: a voyeur, a fetishist, a racist, an admirer of Mussolini, and above all, a man obsessed by his sexual fantasies. With its unforgettable protagonist - odious yet pitiable, vile yet oddly sympathetic - Keith Waterhouse's third novel is both a gripping case study of a social and sexual misfit and an unsettling but wickedly funny...